


Regular Scary

by GoldStarGrl



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Internalized Homophobia, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Movie, i love repressed 40 year olds guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-18 19:16:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20644292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: You’ll feel better once it’s out. Eddie used to say that to him, when they were little.





	Regular Scary

**i. **

The sheets and comforter are starched to the point of solidifying, they might actually crack in half if he bends them. There’s a jizz joke in there somewhere, Richie knows, but for the first time in his life he doesn’t have time to make it. He needs to get out of here, this dusty, uncomfortable inn room. This dusty, uncomfortable town. 

He can hear Bev arguing with someone downstairs – her voice is louder, it carries up the stairs better – as he shoves his hoodie and the extra pair of boxers he packed into his duffel. He finally got Ben out of the room, promised to stay with enough mustard on it that the sweet idiot finally let him be. 

Like hell he is, though. He can’t- they-

If he stays, everyone will know. It will tell them, in some twisted, horrible way Richie can’t even conceive of yet, and then–

Everyone will know. Everyone.

The lo mein he chased with about four shots isn’t sitting right in his stomach. Fuck, was that the last time he'd eaten? He braces his hands against the wall, right above the room’s tiny wicker trash can, and tries to get the vomit out – _ you’ll feel better once it’s out, _ someone used to say that to him, his mom, maybe? – but all he can manage are a few dry heaves, spitting a little before giving up and sitting on the edge of the rock hard bed.

“Rich?”

Someone’s poked their head into the room, and his fight instinct kicks in, ready to scream, ready to beat away whatever horror has come for him next, but it’s just Eddie. Eddie. His heart slows.

“Yup?” He tries breezy. Eddie let’s himself in and shuts the door behind him with a click. 

The front of his clothes are covered with some kind of bile, or liquid waste. His hair is completely fine, not a strand out of place, and for the first time since he fled from the arcade, from the park, Richie bursts out laughing.

“Fuck you,” Eddie hisses. “I need new clothes.”

“You didn’t pack your own? Like a thousand of those little polos?” Richie grins, even though his insides are still shaking. “You got one of those cardboard things that fold your laundry into perfect little squares?”

Eddie kicks off his shoes and yanks his shirt over his head, and Richie stops laughing. He can barely keep from swallowing his _ tongue_. He hates this. He’s–he feels like he’s twelve again, looking at Eddie’s bare shoulders, the strip of his stomach where dark hair dovetails out from somewhere below his jeans. Trying not to touch everything and then wanting to so bad he feels a little sick.

_ Dirty little secret. _

“I’m not ruining anymore of my clothes. Who knows what else is going to happen the longer we stay in this shithole.” Eddie says, and pulls back the sides of Richie’s bag where it’s still open on the bed. “Christ, do you live in bowling shirts? You got body dysmorphia or some–” he cuts himself off, eyebrows knit together. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

_Because you took your fucking shirt off and I think you’re hot. Because this town loves to remind me what a goddamn freak I am and you’re still the only good thing that ever came from living here. Because I’m fucking terrified._ “I think if we stay here we’re going to die.” 

“Statistically, yes.”

Richie leans over the duffel and kisses him. 

Eddie’s clean shaven, but his skin is still rougher than Richie would imagine, in the many, many times he’s imagined kissing a man and then drank a scotch to chase the thought away. Warmer, too, and he can still smell the foul stench of whatever disgusting hell he just narrowly escaped. He thinks he might be doing this a little sloppy, a hand on the back of Eddie’s head a little too hard. He hasn’t kissed someone in three or four years, since he went on two very bland dates with that stand-up who was on that show, Katrina Something.

He stops thinking about Katrina Something long enough to realize Eddie isn’t exactly kissing him back. He's still leaning over the bed, left hand clutching Richie's hoodie where it's stuffed in his bag, completely frozen in place. It's not even clear if he's breathing.

Richie stops. Pulls back. Looks down at his own legs awkwardly folded on the bed.

“Don’t tell anyone I did that,” he says. He is a comedian. This is to say, he has frequently been suicidal in his forty years. But the intensity of the urge he has to force open the window and jump off the rickety fire escape has never been as strong as it is right in this moment.

“Richie.” Eddie sounds stunned, it’s going to turn disgusted as soon as he has his bearings Richie knows it, fuck, _fuck, _why was he so impulsive,this is way scarier than he ever imagined it would be. 

“Please. Look, I said please, okay, so no being a dick about it. Just–please don’t tell anyone.”

Eddie considers this, fingers brushing against his lips. “It’s really fucking weird being back here.”

Richie makes a noise, sort of an affirmative one, bobs is head in agreement. He still can't look up from his goddamn lap.

And then he finds himself flat on his back, Eddie pinning both of his wrists above his head, leaning over him on the most uncomfortable mattress in Maine and possibly America. 

Eddie tilts his head, examines the man he has boxed in beneath him, and kisses him back. His nose bumps against the bottom of Richie’s glasses lens, and there’s a second where he legitimately believes he has died, this is some kind of weird hallucinatory purgatory thing as Pennywise rips his guts out in front of the Derry bandshell. 

Then Eddie pulls back, looking like he has a thousand questions and emotions and points to make all at once, and no one but Eddie, real in the flesh, could pull off a face like that. 

It's light. Eddie is kissing him and everything just– feels light.

“Why-Why did you do that?” Richie hears himself ask, like an _ idiot, if you give him a reason to stop don’t you think he’ll take it, Tozier? _

Eddie blinks. “I don’t know. I don’t know why I did that. You did it first and I...wanted to.” And then he does it again, sliding his dirty hands up either side of Richie’s face, pressing flush against him. He slings his leg over Richie’s hip, straddling him as best he can in their strange, tangled position. 

“Just in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never done this with a guy before,” he mumbles against Richie’s jaw. 

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Richie is breathless, hands running up Eddie’s bare back. “I’ve never done this with any-” It’s a true testament to how disoriented and overwhelmed Richie is that something like that could slip out, half a moan. 

He clamps his mouth shut, but it’s too late. Eddie freezes. After a second that lasts fifty years, he lifts his head away from Richie’s face, to look down at him. 

“Wait, really?”

“Shut the fuck up.” Richie screws up his face, squeezes his eyes shut. His skin feels hot. “Shut the fuck up, dude.”

Eddie can't stop the smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I should’ve known, your entire stand up act is just, like, classic Freudian overcompensation-"

“Oh, you wanna talk Freud, you fucking mama’s boy?” Richie almost smacks him. Even in Derry, he’s pretty sure this isn’t what “smoothly losing your virginity” looks like.

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Shut up about my mom.” Remarkably, this is what reignites his passion. He goes to work unbuttoning Richie’s jeans, pushing them down his thighs in the tight space between them. "This is actually better, now I know I'm not getting any crazy Hollywood STDs from you."

“You’re so fucking weird,” Richie says, the mortification fading enough that he can open his eyes a crack, enough to catch Eddie’s mouth in a kiss again. 

He might actually be able to stand this sorry excuse for a bed. 

**ii.**

His agent’s calls start coming through when he’s at the New Hampshire border, and after being relieved he isn’t dead – _dead dead, I should’ve been dead_ – he arranges a first class ticket back to LA if Richie can just get his sorry ass to Boston in the next four hours. 

He doesn’t make the flight. He drives back to California instead. It takes days and days. He doesn’t talk to anyone but the cashiers at gas stations when he needs candy or beef jerky. He sleeps in his car through most of the Midwest. Bev and Bill call him, checking that he’s gotten home safely, and he doesn’t answer. 

Eddie, to his credit, didn’t tell anyone. But he thinks they might know anyway.

When he gets back to his house in LA, he cuts his hair in the kitchen. He tries shaving every morning but falls out of that habit within three days. He downloads dating apps, the right kind that he was always too terrified to even hover over before. He doesn’t have any good pictures that weren’t taken during a tour, onstage and _recognizable_, so he spends a humiliating twenty minutes taking selfies in his bathroom.

The first time he agrees to meet a man from the apps for drinks, he cancels in a panic ten minutes before he’s supposed to be at the bar. He does that the second time too. The third time he makes it to the restaurant, and the guy keeps touching his leg and smiling, and he _ knows _ every single person in the room can tell they’re on a date. It makes him itchy and embarrassed and he drinks way too much and pukes all over the men’s room floor. When he comes back out his date is gone.

He fires his agent and hires a new one, then fires her too. He stays up all night trying to write material that isn’t about masturbation. He screams into the pillows of his bed and wonders why he even bothered buying a queen, it’s not like anyone has ever stayed over _ ever._

It’s so soft and comfortable, and he finds himself yearning for a shitty hotel in Maine.

“I didn’t lose my virginity until I was forty years old,” he blurts into a mic one night. It’s not one of his bigger shows. This cool, dark basement comedy club is where he used to workshop things, when he first moved out here. Eighteen or nineteen years old, the last time he actually rewrote things in his head, actually cared about the jokes. “That’s absolutely true, ladies and gentlemen.” 

The audience laughs, but it mixes with a few gasps, some sympathetic titters. From the back of the room, someone yells. “That’s fucking horrible!”

“Yes, thank you. That’s what I said when I tasted your dad’s cock.”

Another laugh, people are starting to realize he’s not kidding and they’re still smiling. He’s standing in public, joking about his abysmal gay sex life, and people are _ still smiling. _

He hangs onto the microphone stand a little tighter.

He starts talking about his childhood. About growing up weird and gay in Maine. (“We have two main exports, lobster and trauma.”) How shitty it was, but also how beautiful it could be around the right people. 

People think the clown thing is a metaphor. 

He gets a new agent, and she gets _Variety _ to run a little piece about his turnaround, how he healed and accepted himself through art. Personally he thinks it’s a crock of shit, way too much flowery wording. He’s definitely not making _ art_, he’s just switched from “your mom” to “your dad” jokes. 

But people – _ strangers _ – know Richie is gay, and the world doesn’t fall down. 

_ You’ll feel better once it’s out. _ Eddie used to say that to him, when they were little. When he felt sick. 

His mother calls crying and says she’s sorry he was carrying this around with him, she can’t believe what he’s been through. 

He says it’s fine. Of course he does, she's in her seventies, for fuck's sake. If she actually knew what he’d been through, she’d drop dead in the middle of the Derry supermarket. A lot of people are gay. Very few have murdered their legitimately insane high school bully and escaped a monstrous Pomeranian in the space of an hour. 

She used to smell like lavender and dish soap when she hugged him. She’d whack his ear when he said ‘fuck’ at the dinner table. _ Richie, honestly, you’re not a sailor. _All those little things, forgotten, for _ years. _It makes him want to scream, sometimes, all he’s lost. 

Bev understands that anger. Ben, Bill, Mike too. He forces himself to text them more often, to be heard by people who get it. 

_Eddie would get such a kick out of this. _The thought comes to him multiple times an hour, and then a few times per day, and then just once and awhile, walking by a vintage comic book store or hearing an old song in the car. 

His #6 attempt at a date is the first one that ends in a kiss, long and deep against the doorway of his house, the man’s hands warm on his waist. Some dim, old-fashioned part of his brain tells him to stop it here, take it slow, get used to this whole dating dudes thing.

He invites Steve in and fucks his brains out to the best of his very limited abilities. He writes a few good jokes about it too. 

(He leaves out the part where he called him “Eddie” when they were in bed. Twice. Also the bit where he was gripped by a panic attack so intense he thought he Pennywise was somehow back, laughing at him over his shoulder again. Locking himself in the bathroom to cry at five in the morning isn’t very funny.)

He doesn’t drink as much. Sometimes he returns calls from the other Losers. His skin feels more settled on his body. When he flirts with handsome men after a show he doesn’t have to pretend it’s a joke. 

Something still hurts. Something will probably always hurt. A serrated edge of the blade that’s always hanging from a string around his neck, brushing against his chest.

Kids still come up and quote his show to him, and he gets the references. He wonders how many of them are Like Him. 

_ Eddie would get such a kick out of this. _

He doesn’t bump against that sharp edge so much, though, anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote like five other “Maine sucks” jokes I didn’t use because I am from Massachusetts and couldn’t help myself.


End file.
